Rice U Engineers Develop Vibrating Vest for the Deaf

Engineering students at Rice University are working with mentors and Baylor College of Medicine to develop a vibrating vest that lets those who are deaf hear others through vibrations. The Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer (VEST) works with a mobile app that hears for them, and the VEST vibrates in patterns that those who wear it can learn to interpret the patterns as words. It is just a prototype now, but they have already had test subjects successfully use the VEST. The VEST was already presented at a TED talk by the team creating it, the Eagleman Substitution Project team, and they presented again at the Design of Medical Devices conference in April.

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